Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Sunday, January 03, 2016

Good-Bye to 2015, the year of lies, hoaxes, and outright fakeries

Are we becoming a nations of liars, or a nation of people who like being lied to?

Benny Huang says goodbye to "the year of lies, hoaxes, and outright fakeries."

In what looked like a staged moment on the campaign trail, Hillary
Clinton fielded a question from a nine year-old boy at a town hall
meeting in New Hampshire concerning pay inequity between the sexes. The
boy, Relic Reilly, asked why his engineer father earned more than his
mother, a pre-K teacher.

I think my mother is working much harder, is
working more harder than my father and she deserves to have more money,
like, get more money, than my father. Because she’s taking care of
children and I just don’t think it’s fair.

… if Hillary Clinton is going to make her campaign into another
historic “first” for women, she needs to pretend that women such as
herself are oppressed—hence the fake question about a fake issue.
Coming, as this question did, on New Year’s Eve, I saw it as a
fitting end to 2015, the fakest year on record. Never before has the news been dominated by so many lies, hoaxes, and counterfeits.

When 2015 began, we were already in the midst of a rape hoax at the
University of Virginia, where a college student claimed to have been
raped on broken glass at a frat party that never actually happened. … When the
story became absolutely indefensible, Rolling Stone retracted
it and conducted an investigation to determine what had gone wrong,
though the investigation itself was pretty fake …

That rape hoax was followed by another at Columbia University, where a
female student carried a mattress around campus to protest the
university’s supposed refusal to address her rape at the hands of a
former lover. Actually, the university did investigate and found that
her story lacked credibility. The details did not stack up and her story
was almost certainly a lie, a desperate act of revenge against a man
she had been infatuated with—and probably still was [still is?].

Also in January, Muslim terrorists conducted a very real attack against the satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
What followed, however, was a completely insincere outpouring of
support for the principle of free speech. Leaders from across Europe and
the world converged in Paris to declare that they would not be bullied
into censoring speech. That was a huge lie, of course, because nearly
all European governments punish speech, especially speech that offends
Muslims. Before, during, and after the attacks citizens were being
arrested for mere words. In July, Charlie Hebdo announced that it would no longer draw Mohammed. In the future, they would self-censor.

[2015] was also the year of fake women—by which I mean
dudes who wear skirts and demand to be treated as women. Two high
profile cases in American high schools involving transgender “girls” who
were demanding to use the girls’ locker room were settled when the
Department of Education required all schools that receive federal
funds—which is nearly every public school in the country—to allow
students to use the locker room of their choice. Another fake woman,
Bruce “Caitlyn” Jenner, won Glamour magazine’s Woman of the
Year Award. The husband of a former winner, NYPD policewoman Moira Smith
who died in the 9/11 attacks, returned the award he had accepted on
behalf of his deceased wife. “I was shocked and saddened to learn that
Glamour has just named Bruce Jenner ‘Woman of the Year’…” said James
Smith. “Was there no woman in America, or the rest of the world, more
deserving than this man?” Indeed. [And let's not forget the deception by the defenders of Planned Parenthood.]

The catchy phrase “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” was found to be an utter
fabrication after a lengthy investigation into the 2014 shooting of
Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer. Brown’s hands had not
been up, he was not shot in the back, he had not been kneeling on the
ground, and he was not “minding [his] own business” as Brown’s thug
friend Dorian Johnson told reporters after the incident. Brown was
fleeing a robbery when he attempted to murder Officer Darren Wilson with
his own gun. The investigation revealed that witnesses lied in order to
frame Wilson. The only element of reality in the entire Michael Brown
case was all the mayhem and looting that followed. [More on gun control and on racialissues at the links.]

In June a supposedly scientific study published in the peer-reviewed Science
magazine was found to have been a graduate student’s concoction. The
study, titled “When Contact Changes Minds” was designed to measure the
degree to which entrenched opponents of same-sex marriage could be
swayed by sob stories, or what they called “heartfelt, reciprocal and
vulnerable conversations.” The study’s designer, PhD candidate Michael
LaCour of UCLA, intended to show that mean old bigots (like me) just
haven’t met many “gay” people. After a little contact with homosexuals
and hearing them pour their hearts out about all the made-up grief they
have to suffer through, we bigots usually relent. Or at least that’s
what the study showed.

But the study was fake. … How this study passed
peer review is a mystery—unless peer review is basically a worthless
ritual, as I suspect.

The news cycle was dominated for the better part of two weeks in
mid-September with the tale of Ahmed Mohamed, a fourteen year old in
Irving, Texas who was arrested for bringing to school what looked very
much like a bomb. As it turned out, it was just a briefcase with the
innards of an old Radio Shack alarm clock mounted inside. Young Mr.
Mohamed claimed to have “invented” a clock, which wasn’t even true. It
didn’t take long for the narrative factory to manufacture the story that
Ahmed wanted—“Muslim Kid Genius Arrested by Bigoted Texans!” The story
was absolute rubbish from beginning to end. Ahmed Mohamed was hoping and
praying that his teachers would take the bait he was dangling before
them—a briefcase with protruding wires. Prior to his arrest he was told
by at least two teachers that the clock he “invented” looked like a
bomb. Having succeeded in raising an alarm, he proceeded to play the
victim, and is still playing the victim. Victimhood is a pretty good
gig, if you can get it. Crowdfunding sites raised money for his college
education. The White House, NASA, Facebook and Google all extended
invitations to the supposed child prodigy. And of course—of course!—his
family is suing for fifteen million dollars. Getting arrested is the
best thing that ever happened to this kid.

The year ended with another disintegrating tale of anti-Muslim
bigotry, also in Texas. On Christmas Day, a mosque in Houston burned
down in an apparent act of arson. The Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR) leaped on the incident as a possible bias crime.
Unfortunately for CAIR, the feds arrested a devout Muslim named Gary
Nathaniel Moore. He is the lead suspect. This one has self-victimization hoax written all over it.

[2015] should be remembered as the Year of the Big
Lie—the year the US Army’s once prestigious Ranger School debased the
coveted Ranger tab by handing it out to women who failed to meet
standards, the year in which black students posing online as angry white
racists made terroristic threats to kill black people, and the year
that the Supreme Court discovered a fake right to a fake marriages in
the text of our Constitution.

This trend toward mendacity is truly disturbing. Are we becoming a
nation of liars, or a nation of people who like being lied to? I say
no. We’re merely victims of a journalistic establishment that barely
even pretends to report the news anymore.